Scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark studying the effects of climate change on weather-dependent electricity systems have found a silver lining in Earth's otherwise fraught future outlook. Temperatures may climb and seas may rise, but the lights (and, undoubtedly, the air conditioning) will still be on in nations with high capacities for wind and solar energy. The research, published March 6 in the journal Joule, suggests that these electricity systems should work almost equally well in both historical and future European climates despite changing weather patterns.

A team of researchers at UC Santa Cruz have recently developed a new machine learning approach to characterize happiness, called CruzAffect. Their approach, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can be applied to different models for affective content classification, including both traditional classifiers and deep learning convolutional neural networks (CNN).

It's dark on the backroad as a motorist speeds toward the intersection. Up ahead, the stop sign blends with the night and in seconds a deadly crash occurs. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than half of all roadway fatalities occur on rural roads. Now engineers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are building and testing a low-cost, self-powered thermal system that will detect vehicles, improve the visibility of stop signs and prevent deaths.